If you’ve spent any amount of time with us at Advice Local, you know very well that we consider listings management services a pillar of local SEO. But as we move deeper into the AI Age, and the prevalence of search using chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and CoPilot rises, you may wonder if these services are still relevant. We’ll address this today by looking at listings management and directories, and their place in a quickly expanding world of artificial intelligence (AI).
Listings Management Establishes Trust in Generative Engines
We know that local marketers and agency partners want to stay up-to-date on what’s happening, and what is relevant to you and your clients’ success. With the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, the ways consumers searched began to change. And while we now have Artificial Intelligence Optimization (AIO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to help us capture the attention of consumers and AI robots, one thing that hasn’t changed is the importance of listings management in this process.
Trust signals remain a key part of the equation in the AI Age. This is true for both the people searching and the large language models (LLMs) behind their favorite AI agents. That means knowing how to amplify NAP data for your agency clients in directories is still a relevant step in the marketing process.
While search output may look different, to return answers to searchers’ queries, behind the scenes the Googlebot and AI robots are still searching for clean and consistent local business citations, authoritative content, and structured data to scrape. These foundational steps remain the basis of trust for local search ranking and generative engine answers.
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